The boy ducked aside, his ragged little trousers fluttering in the wind. Then he sat down on the market steps to count his coin.
“Hi! twenty-five cents. There’s a mutton stew and onions for you and your folks a Christmas, Mike Slattery, and all this jolly green stuff thrown in free gratis. That chap was a gen’leman, and no mistake. Won’t Winnie hop when she sees me a-h’isting of these here over our stairs, and she a-blowin’ at me for a week to bring her some sich, and me niver seein’ nary a chance at ’em ’cept stealin’s, which is wot this here feller ain’t up to no ways whatsomever. No, sir. Hi!”
Mike waved his Christmas boughs aloft in great glee.
An old gentleman with gold-headed cane and spectacles was going up the steps of the market, followed by a beautiful black-and-white setter. The playful dog sprang at the green branches. Mike held on to them stoutly. The dog suddenly let go of them, and bounded away, while Mike rolled over and over to the foot of the steps, clutching tightly the pine boughs.
“You’ll ketch it,” he muttered, setting his teeth hard together behind his white lips, and trying in vain to scramble up.
“Yer hurt, bub?” asked a wrinkled old apple woman, turning round on her three-legged stool, and thrusting her nose inquiringly out of the folds of the old brown shawl, which was wrapped around her head.
“You bet I be!” whimpered Mike, pointing forlornly with his one unoccupied finger to his bruised ankle.
“Been playin’ pitch-pennies, yer mis’ble young ’un!” grinned a tall boy, strolling by with his hands in his pockets, and his ferret eyes on the sharp lookout for mischief.
In a twinkling he swooped up Mike’s small coin, which had rattled to the pavement, and vanished with them in a struggling tangle of horse cars and omnibuses before Mike finished his desperate yell of, “Gim me ’um.”
By this time a crowd had gathered about the prostrate Mike, who, faint with pain, was at last lifted into the chaise of a kind-hearted doctor, who was passing, and carried to his house in Bone Court.